From user perspective I fully agree! Having to press a Save button
is silly. In my opinion a Save should be always be implicit when
users move off a record... Cancel is the other option that probably
should bring up a dialog.

As I was reading this message I was thinking about that exact deal:
you work in an app that constantly pops up dialogs. After a while
you figure you know what you're doing and *never* read the thing
anyway.

For database apps I think the key is good judgement. You need to
decide what works best, or better yet, give the user the option
to show dialogs on save operations. This can even be built into
the data access layer as an option that should make this task
next to transparent.

+++ Rick ---